White House Advisor: Use of Term Cyberwar “Terrible”

White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt said that policymakers and others should stop “conflating… cyberwar with cyber-espionage with cybercrime.” Talk of an “Internet kill-switch” to be used in the event of cyberwarfare has reemerged in light of recent events in Egypt, and coincides with a new federal initiative intended to improve security for individual Internet users. According to Mr. Schmidt, securing the information superhighway involves too many factors to be lumped into a single bucket. Resolving online criminality like identity theft should be treated differently than protecting the electric grid from sabotage by foreign powers or online espionage, but war-like rhetoric may threaten the U.S.’s ability to deal with any of these issues effectively, he warned.